Chris Horsman was a proud man after seeing Wales under-20s claim a hard fought win over England in their opening Six Nations encounter in Parc Eirias on Saturday night.

Wales ran in tries from Liam Belcher and Tom Phillips with fly-half Daniel Jones converting one and kicking three penalties. England replied with scores from Joe Marchant and James Chisholm with Rory Jennings adding a penalty and conversion.

England paid the price for their ill-discipline, Charlie Beckett, Kieran Treadwell and Paul Hill all being sent to the sin-bin, the later two overlapping, while Wales finished with 14 men after Garyn Smith was yellow carded in a frenetic finish.

Horsman, who is one of the specialist skills coaches in the Welsh set up, was rightly proud at the end, but says this is now the benchmark for his side to aspire to.

Horsman said: “It is good, but we have got to look at the result in two contexts. Yes it is very good to beat England, (they are) double world champions, but we have got to look at in the context it is great to beat them but that can’t be the exception, it has got to be the norm.

“In terms of what we are trying to develop in Welsh rugby, yes it is great to be a team like England and get that monkey off our backs for want of a better phrase, but if we want to be challenging and developing players we’ve got to be using this as the norm.

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“You don’t want it to be all or nothing and for next week our levels to drop off, like peaks and troughs. It has to be now a case of this is what we expect, lets look at it and see how we can improve.

“We will go back and pour over the footage and I will be going to the players and I am sure the other coaches will se saying ‘yeah this is good, but this is where we can get better’, because yes we want the team to win, but we have a responsibility in these new roles to make sure individual players get better as well.”

Up next for Wales is a trip to face Scotland on Friday and Horsman, who enjoyed a stint in North Wales as head coach of RGC until taking up his role with the WRU last month, believes they need to carry this on now.

Wales stood up to the full forced of the England attack in the final dying minutes of the contest on Saturday in Colwyn Bay, much to the delight of Horsman.

He added: “We talked about it in the week and they are a good group and a good bunch of guys and a pleasure to coach, and they showed that resilience out there.

“But there was also a level of clinicalness in terms of we got into the red zones and okay a couple of times we turned the ball over a bit easy, but there were some good performance and some good squad performances as well.

“In the Six Nations if you win your first game it is very much about momentum. We have won our first game and we have got that momentum going into the Scotland game, but we can’t allow our standards to slip. Our standards have got to improve and I am sure there are lots of areas where we can highlight and get better.”